Charity Hope Valentine, the ditzy, accident-prone, unlucky-in-love dance-club hostess who is the heroine of this 1966 musical collaboration between Neil Simon, Cy Coleman and Dorothy Fields, is a woman to love or hate. You either find her so irritating that you want to dump her in a lake - which is where she starts the show, courtesy of her latest unreliable beau - or you fall for her gamine charm as she adventures through New York in search of true love and a man who isn't a complete jerk

Sheffield Sweet Charity this glorious revival reminds one just how good a musical this is. Based on a Fellini movie, it was written by Neil Simon with music and lyrics by Cy Coleman and Dorothy Fields and choreography from Bob Fosse - one of the most memorable line-ups of talent in Broadway history.

Crucible's dazzling new version directed by Timothy Sheader and choreographed by Karen Bruce more than lives up to expectations. It frequently threatens to burst from the stage with a dizzying joie de vivre and sense of fun and romance.

The story of a New York dance hall hostess and her endless search for a happy ending makes a surprisingly effective Christmas show, retaining the sixties spirit of the original but also bringing the material completely up to date.

Dated, disingenuous and demeaning to women even in 1966, Neil Simon's book is as much a bar to enjoying Sweet Charity as a couple snogging in front of you, a man snoring behind and children eating crisps on either side. Children, though, ought not to be at this musical, adapted at Bob Fosse's suggestion from Fellini's film Nights of Cabiria. It was the first show Fosse directed as well as choreographed, and his peculiar style of trancelike contempt is here used only in a number where it really belongs. As a row of dancers-for-hire wait to be chosen, the kind of music that accompanies a striptease plays against a hellish obbligato of dead voices chanting: "Fun... laughs... good time.''

But the young Cy Coleman's splendid score and the old Dorothy Fields's crafty lyrics are steadily undermined by the limp and embarrassing story, a series of humiliations visited on its title character.

WELL, here’s a show to send the post-Christmas blues scuttling. Tuneful, zestful, imaginative and tart. Timothy Sheader’s direction credits include two other musicals, Wild Wild Women at the Orange Tree and Rodgers & Hammerstein’s A Grand Night for Singing at the Latchmere, but either one of these London theatres would fit ten times over on the Crucible’s tremendous stage.

Everyone knows the hit songs from Sweet Charity. The best numbers are like old flames: familiar and fun or dangerously seductive. The raunchy jazz of "Big Spender" certainly gets this 1966 New York musical rolling, thanks to Cy Coleman and his lyricist Dorothy Fields. Moreover, in Tim Sheader's Crucible production, Charity and her fellow "hostesses" sing that brassy come-on with notable flashes of anger, down in their pimping boss's night-club. They're obliged (as choreographed by Karen Bruce) to dirty-dance round poles to earn a buck. But instead of just thrusting erotically to the beat, they snarl, with a hint of imminent women's lib about them.

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